Did they tell Charles Darwin that God was picking flowers?

Charles Darwin’s favorite child, Annie, contracted scarlet fever at age 10. She agonized for 6 weeks before dying. Also a casualty was Darwin’s faith in a beneficent Creator. The book Evolution: Triumph of an Idea, by Carl Zimmer, tells us that Darwin “lost faith in angels.” That’s an odd expression. Why would it be used?

Did they tell him that God was picking flowers?

Is there any analogy more slanderous to God than the one in which God is picking flowers? Up there in heaven He has the most beautiful garden imaginable. But it is not enough! He is always on the watch for pretty flowers, the very best, and if He spots one in your garden, He helps himself, even though it may be your only one. Yes, He needs more angels, and if your child is the most pure, the most beautiful, happy, innocent child that can be, well….watch out! He or she may become next new angel. Sappy preachers give this illustration all the time, apparently thinking helps.

The picking flowers analogy is nowhere found in the Bible. However, there is a parable parallel in all respects EXCEPT THE MORAL AT THE END. It is the one Nathan told to David after he had taken Bathsheba as a wife and killed her husband.

“The LORD sent Nathan to David. When he came to him, he said, "There were two men in a certain town, one rich and the other poor.  The rich man had a very large number of sheep and cattle,  but the poor man had nothing except one little ewe lamb he had bought. He raised it, and it grew up with him and his children. It shared his food, drank from his cup and even slept in his arms. It was like a daughter to him.
"Now a traveler came to the rich man, but the rich man refrained from taking one of his own sheep or cattle to prepare a meal for the traveler who had come to him. Instead, he took the ewe lamb that belonged to the poor man and prepared it for the one who had come to him."
David burned with anger against the man and said to Nathan, "As surely as the LORD lives, the man who did this deserves to die!  He must pay for that lamb four times over, because he did such a thing and had no pity."
Then Nathan said to David, "You are the man!”             (2 Samuel 12:1-7)

This analogy appeals to us. It is just. The man is not expected to take comfort that the king stole his wife. No, he deserves execution! So how is it that preachers have God doing the same, expecting it will comfort? Of course it will not! The man who stole the sole lamb deserves to die! Preachers make a horrific mess trying to extract themselves from the moral corners their doctrines unfailingly paint them into.

How different history might have been had Darwin known the truth about death. Not just Darwin, but every one of his time, as well as before and after. Instead, fed a diet of phony pieties….junk food, really…..he and others of inquisitive minds searched elsewhere in an attempt to make sense of life.

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“In the absence of a workable theodicy, when people have no clue as to why a God of love would permit evil and suffering, God takes many shots. He took one in an episode of the TV whodunnit series, Dr. Blake. An elderly priest had been murdered. Upon solving the crime in his customary way: with unusual insight, unusual empathy, and unusual flare for getting under his superiors’ skin, Doc Blake finds occasion to enter the church alone at the end of the episode. Is he there because the idealistic younger priest exhorted him not to let his wartime experiences destroy his relationship with God? Nope. Though one anticipates that outcome for a moment, he is not there to make peace with God. He is there to tell God off.

“Yes, I know. It’s been a long time since I was last here,” he begins, after a long introspective silence, during which one imagines repentance. “A funeral, in case you’ve forgotten.” [Uh oh. God—forgets?] “It’s all right. I didn’t come expecting an answer this time [either]. Though I imagine Father Morton [the murdered priest] did. Did he know he was losing his mind [which caused him to reveal confidential confessions in public sermons, which in turn caused a not-too-penitent church member to kill him, lest he be compromised next]?”

“Did he kneel right here and ask you for your help? I’m sure he did. And what did you give him? A sign? Or nothing? All these children—your children—begging you for help. What father ignores his children?” The episode is entitled, “The Sky is Empty.” It is a title that has nothing to do with the plot itself but appears selected only to drive home the “lesson” at the end: there is no God.

“Thing is, it’s not a bad question, that final one. It should be answered. In the absence of a satisfying theodicy, it cannot be. That is why it borders on criminal to withhold that theodicy. With it, the question would not even have had to be asked. The good doctor would have known what can and does happen in a world whose forebears have deliberately severed themselves from God.”

From ‘A Workman’s Theodicy: Why Bad Things Happen’

After the war, concentration camp Joseph Kempler was invited to a hearing in Germany for the purpose of identifying war criminals. There, he struck up an acquaintance with some Jehovah’s Witnesses who had also been incarcerated. He knew nothing of their beliefs but he had previously encountered them, as a camp within a camp, at the Melk labor prison. He sat with them throughout the days of the hearings.

The case of one former S.S. guard came up for review. He was the guard whose abuse had resulted in the complete loss of use of one arm and restricted use of the other for one of Kempler’s Witness companions. Kempler was both dumbfounded and furious when the latter sat quietly, puffing away at his pipe, and would not speak up. Here was his chance to exact payback! The man wouldn’t do it. “‘Vengeance in mine; I will repay,’ says Jehovah”—he cited the Bible verse at Romans 12:19

Kempler’s imprisonment through six Nazi camps had broken him, both spiritually and emotionally. He was very explicit on that point in testimony for the USHMM archives, and he didn’t have to be. Even after he became a Witness in 1953, healing would take many years, during which time he credited his wife for raising his children. He had always been there, but not emotionally available. Like the Ethiopian eunuch of the sixth chapter of Acts, his background knowledge had allowed him to put the pieces together quickly. He soon could explain the complete Bible backward and forward. But, he would zone out under emotional stress, a mechanism that had enabled his survival in the camps.

He was also explicit in that USHMM testimony that the Witnesses had not been broken. Physically, sometimes they had been, but spiritually and emotionally they had come through intact. Probably, that is why he invited the Witnesses into his home when they called back in 1953. He had previously accepted from them a book because a book, any book, for only fifty cents was a great bargain; he had always been a voracious reader. He had been surprised to see them, imagining they were a German religion. But his visitors showed him a map inside one of their books to indicate they were earthwide. ‘It’s a wonderful hope,’ he said, when they described promises of a paradise earth, ‘but it’s not something I could ever have.’ He was proved wrong.

Mauthassen was the camp in which guards loaded crushingly heavy boulders on the shoulder of inmates and made them ascend uneven quarry steps to transport them elsewhere. (Kempler was angry when the government later replaced them with smooth steps for the sake of modern tourists.) One might easily topple over the edge to one’s death, or even be deliberately pushed off. Having survived a horrific stint in Mauthassen, Kempler was transferred by cattle car to the Melk labor camp, as though the culmination of a survival-of-the-fittest experiment. On that car, prisoners were packed in so tightly that if one raised his arms, he or she might not get them down again. People relieved themselves where they stood.

At Melk, people died through overwork and mistreatment, but no one was shot—it was a labor camp for things the Germans needed. Kempler later described for the USC Shoah Foundation his first encounter with the Witnesses at that camp. It was “a barrack in the camp, which was surrounded by its own wire, so the people who were in there, they couldn’t go out and mix with the others, and nobody could go in. So I asked ‘Who are these people? Must be very dangerous if they had a camp within a camp. . . . They said, ‘They are Jehovah’s Witnesses. they were all Germans, mostly, and they were locked up because they wouldn’t go along with Hitler, they wouldn’t serve in the army.’

So I said, ‘Why do they lock them up? They said, ‘Because otherwise they will go out and preach to others.’ They’re considered too dangerous for that. But what they told me was, these people were the only ones who were not victims because they were told that by signing a statement denouncing their religion was enough to set them free. And they wouldn’t go.

This was something that was totally unusual because any one of us would si—(laughs) ah, can you imagine signing a piece of paper and you can get out? So, I mean, it was the talk of the camp and they were there, most of them, going back to 1933-34. . . . the Germans trusted them for  babysitters or maybe its barbers—they wouldn't cut their throats, so as a result they had good positions. And these people were known to always support, would rather help one another . . . this made a powerful impression.”

Even in camp the Witnesses were too thought dangerous to mix with the general population. Nazis who would inflict Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar guards upon the imprisoned populace, to persuade them they were subhuman, would not inflict these ones. [&&&FN Kempler’s video testimony is, at time of writing, readily found on the internet. A three-hour segment is found in the collections of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, at https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn508850.

“It is difficult to speak with Jews,” he relates in the Engardio-Shephard 2006 documentary, Knocking. “They say I became a traitor. Six million Jews died and I joined the other side. I was among those survivors who felt that God was really responsible and guilty. He was the one who permitted the Holocaust. So we didn’t fail him, we didn’t do anything wrong. He failed us. And this is a very common belief.”

“God is being maligned and misunderstood and in many different ways looked down upon as being uncaring or dead or whatever, and there are all kinds of distortions as to what God is and who he is. To be able to speak up in his defense . . . what a powerful turnaround from somebody where I was to become a defender of God . . . what a wonderful privilege this is.”

Mr. Kempler saw, in the Holocaust aftermath, an opportunity to defend God. Though barbaric treatment turned millions away from God, millions who could not fathom how God could possibly permit such a monstrous thing—and he was among them—he was, in time, fortified by knowledge of why the world was as it is, what hope there was for change, and how to best live in the meantime. Armed with such knowledge, he was drawn to the people who, with faith and dignity intact, survived what was likely the greatest evil in history.

Doubtless, he many times pondered the Book of Job—not in real time, of course—at the time of Holocaust, he and fellow inmates thought only of survival. Most became, in his words, “like animals, just out to survive, and being an animal is as close as you can describe such persons.” Belief in God turned to disappointment, then anger, then disappeared entirely. “They died before they died,” said he of his fellow captives. Nobody grieved at another’s death, even of family. He shut down emotionally. He later credited his faith as a Witness for the supportive atmosphere it bestowed in which renewal could take place. That, and a renewed Bible understanding that consistently likens spiritual things to water, which is healthy when it moves and stagnant when it does not.

Jehovah’s Witnesses weathered the storm, with faith and dignity intact, They had read the Book of Job. They had gotten the greater sense of it. Victor Frankl, a Jew who would later go on to write several books, relates what a gut-punch it was for him, after his camp experience, to encounter members of the general populace who said, ‘We didn’t know.’ In some cases it was a conscience-salving dodge, but in most cases they actually didn’t know. It wasn’t even one of those lawyerly ‘knew or should have known’ scenarios; in most cases there was no reason they ‘should have known.’ How could anyone be expected to imagine such atrocities?

It was a gut-punch for him. It meant his suffering went unnoticed. Wasn’t that nearly the same as it being in vain? Witnesses were not undercut by that perception. At the very least, they knew their suffering was observed by God, as Job’s had been. They knew they had been given opportunity to display loyalty to God under suffering, again like Job. They had not felt their lives purposeless even in confinement. They had been given opportunity to build up others, when not physically separated from them, with their kingdom hope. They had even smuggled out detailed diagrams of the camps, as early as the 1930s, to be forwarded to Western media sources. Those sources disbelieved them, since it was from the Witnesses, but their spiritual brothers came to know. And, of course, they had been given opportunity to help each other. That gives purpose to anyone.

Kempler died in 2021, at 93 years of age. He did not outlive Leopold Engleitner, another Witness Holocaust survivor, for a time the oldest one, who with the assistance of his publisher, toured the globe at 103. “I’ll be back,” he had said in California, imitating the then-governor’s movie days. He would visit classrooms, and the kids, as with Kempler, couldn’t get enough of him. He described himself as “a busy boy, with no time to die.” Somehow, he later found the time, at 107 years of age. Kempler did not outlive him. But, 93 certainly qualifies as being ‘old and satisfied with days.’ And, just a few years prior to his death, his daughter-in-law published his memoirs. The book is entitled The Altered I: Memoirs of Holocaust Survivor Joseph Kempler. It is a good title, for he was altered—twice.

(From my upcoming book, tentatively titled 'Job and the Workman's Theodicy: Why Bad Thing Happen'--perhaps verbatim, perhaps in modified form.)

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Modern theologians have discarded Satan. It is so yesterday. Satan makes Christianity a dualism, a bad to offset the good. The devil is a good concept to have around, since you can blame all your troubles on him. But modern theologians of the monotheistic religions have long since moved on from him, as though an embarrassment from their childhood.

I think this is because they are very much into fixing the world via human solutions. They are really not too much different from secularists, only with a light God-seasoning sprinkled on top. A Devil makes all their efforts moot. How can you fix the world if the basic problem is outside your influence? When they do devil at all, they present him as an analogy for ‘the evil that is within us.’ That is something they imagine will yield to their repair efforts.

Then too I think they suffer an overreaction to how the churches have portrayed the Devil, as the master torturer of hellfire, somehow commissioned by God to do his dirty work of punishing sinners. What logical person wouldn’t want to break away from that?—and these theologians are nothing if not those who pride themselves on their logic.

Chasing down a lecture series that Tom Whitepebble pointed me to, I found the lecturer, James Hall, told that he was raised Lutheran Evangelical. Nobody does hellfire more than they. So when he described himself as an “ethical monotheist,” I just assumed that his worldview incorporated a devil. Instead, he tested theodicy after theodicy, punched holes in all of them, and only last did he consider a “dualism” solution that involves the devil. (A theodicy, for anyone who doesn’t know, is an attempt to explain how God could coexist with evil) He conceded this one made the most sense, but also that it was very unpopular, so unpopular that he seemed to think portions of his audience might not have heard of it.

This “unpopular” theodicy only posited that there was a devil. It did not touch on how that one came to be, why God permits it, how he will resolve it, or any other aspect of the Universal Court case scenario—just that there was a devil whom you could pin all the bad stuff on. I had asked Whitepebble if he knew where our court case scenario originated. Based on something he had heard, he pointed me to this lecture series. But it really didn’t touch on the essence of it, just that there was a master villain devil.

Imagine. The fellow reviews theodicy after theodicy, rejects them all as unsatisfactory, and ignores only the one that works. It recalls what a certain friend used to say to me, a friend who is fond of alternative medicine: “If it works, insurance won’t cover it.”

It is not a contradiction in terms to find a given theologian might not believe in God. Some are atheist. This is because theology is not a study of God, as the uninitiated might assume, but a study of man’s interaction with the concept of God. Thus, there doesn’t even have to be a God for the ‘concept of God’ to be valid. It is entirely a human field of study, like sociology or anthropology.

It is all a part of my current work in progress, a review of our ‘court case’ theodicy. It begins with discussion of the Book of Job. In fact, that’s where I first got the idea to write it, when we were doing Job in our congregation Bible readings. It had been vaguely kicking around in my head before, but it needed those Job readings to gel.

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These brothers who say how prayer is communication with God and you never get a busy signal, to modest chuckling from the audience?

Job keeps getting a busy signal!! That’s what he can’t understand. He’s heard those talks, most likely, and even joined in applause at the end. But now he keeps getting a busy signal!

He does express confidence in God—if only he could get through to him:

“Would [God] contend with me using his great power? No, surely he would give me a hearing,” he says. (Job 22:6) If only he could get through. Why does he want to get through? Because his life has devolved into a pile of you-know-what, that’s why, and he wants to fill God’s ear about it!

And then Eliphaz comes around—man, these guys are obnoxious! to say:

“Get to know Him, and you will be at peace; Then good things will come your way. . . If you return to the Almighty, you will be restored.”

‘Why why why doesn’t God hear me? Job cries. ‘I cry out to him day and night, but all I get is a busy signal!’

‘Well, if you weren’t so wicked, it wouldn’t happen,’ is Eliphaz’s answer, and that of the two other companions.

It is only Eliphaz and crew who feel this way? There was a flood of preachers post-Katrina in New Orleans to say the cities ruination was its own fault. God destroyed New Orleans, Pat Robertson declared, because of abortion and homosexuality. But the mayor, Ray Nagin, disagreed. Sharply. At his own news conference, he set the record straight. God did not destroy his town because of abortion and homosexuality.

He destroyed it because of war in Iraq and disunity among black residents!

The reasons differed, according to individual and political peeves. But the common ground was that God did it!

And here are these three frauds advancing that ‘theology’ with Job—God did it! For what reason? Listen to Eliphaz carry on: (22:6-9)

“You strip people of their garments, leaving them naked. You do not give the tired one a drink of water, And you hold back food from the hungry. The land belongs to the powerful man, And the favored one dwells in it. But you sent away widows empty-handed, And you crushed the arms of fatherless children!”

He’s made the point before, more gently, but been rebuffed. He does not like to be contradicted, and so juices up his charge of what Job ‘must have’ done to be suffering so!

Furthermore, to distill his remarks, ‘God could care less if you’re good—what’s that to him? But he sure does care if you’re bad, ever eager to dish out the punishment in that event. No wonder people say the God of the Old Testament is mean! If we are to listen to Pat Robertson and Ray Nagin, the God of the New Testament is, too! And don’t get me going on how when a tiny child dies, it’s because God needed another flower in his perfect heavenly garden; these preachers make a god-awful mess when they try to extract themselves from the corners their wrong doctrines unfailingly paint them into! (in this case, not only the doctrine that the soul can never die, but that all good souls go straight to heaven upon doing so):

Eliphaz the Temanite said in reply: “Can a man be of use to God? Can anyone with insight be of benefit to him? Does the Almighty care that you are righteous, Or does he gain anything because you follow the course of integrity?” (22:1-3) He could care less, is the charge, whereas Santa Claus at least doesn’t give you coal when you’re ’been nice!’

Job is not going to let these guys gaslight him; that’s why he wants his hearing before God—but he keeps getting a busy signal! If he could only argue out his case, he knows God would listen.

“If only I knew where to find God! I would go to his place of dwelling. I would present my case before him And fill my mouth with arguments; I would learn how he would answer me And take note of what he says to me. Would he contend with me using his great power? No, surely he would give me a hearing. There the upright one could set matters straight with him, And I would be acquitted once and for all by my Judge.” (23:3-7)

“But if I go east, he is not there; And I return and I cannot find him. When he is working on the left, I cannot look upon him; Then he turns to the right, but I still do not see him.” (8-9) A busy signal!

Whereupon Job expands on, not just his own suffering, but all the rotten things God puts up with:

“People move boundary markers; They carry off flocks for their own pasture. They drive away the donkey of fatherless children And seize the widow’s bull as security for a loan. They force the poor off the road; The helpless of the earth must hide from them. The poor forage for food like wild donkeys in the wilderness; They seek food in the desert for their children. They must harvest in another’s field And glean from the vineyard of the wicked. They spend the night naked, without clothing; They have no covering for the cold. They are drenched by the mountain rains; They cling to the rocks for lack of shelter. The fatherless child is snatched away from the breast; And the garments of the poor are taken as security for a loan, Forcing them to go about naked, without clothing, And hungry, as they carry the sheaves of grain. They toil among the terrace walls in the heat of the day; They tread the winepresses, yet they go thirsty. The dying keep groaning in the city; The fatally wounded cry for help, But God does not regard this as improper. (24:2-12)

God will fix it; Job does not doubt he will—but it would sure be nice if He would step on it a little. He will fix it in the long run, but as John Kenneth Galbraith said, ‘In the long run we’re all dead,’ and Job’s faith in a resurrection for himself is not so ironclad as some suppose.

“God will use his strength to do away with the powerful; Though they may rise up, they have no assurance of life. God lets them become confident and secure, But his eyes are on everything they do. They are exalted for a little while, then they are no more. They are brought low and gathered like everyone else; They are cut off like heads of grain.” (24: 22-24)

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Nobody has ever had a wish granted to them like Job:

“If only my words were written down, If only they could be inscribed in a book!” (Job 19:23)

Folded into the world’s all-time best seller, they now are, where they stand as the supreme example of a ‘theodicy,’ an exploration of the the problem of evil—or, define it as the question, ‘Why do the righteous suffer?’

The university-educated promptly shoot themselves in the foot by dividing the Book of Job into two books. The first, in their opinion, is a Jewish fable comprising what is now the first two and the last chapters of Job. The second consists of all the rest, the unending dialogue of Job, his three tormentors, Elihu, and God. You almost suspect that their goal is to flatter the intellect, and it matters not to them that they throw away the key to understanding—as they do with the early Genesis chapters that frame the overall theodicy of which the Book of Job is a subset.

Is it that those first two chapters read too ‘fundamentalist’ for them, they who are educated in critical thinking? They should waste their time on a silly little story of God and the Devil making a wager? As though, once they finish and the outcome with Job has been determined, they say, ‘Whoa! That was loads of fun! Let’s do it again with someone else!’ The notion (which every Jehovah’s Witness understands, even the children) that Job represents a test case of whether humans can keep integrity under trial, is lost upon them.

The other ‘benefit’ of divorcing Job’s trials from the opening chapters which frame it is that you get to spin the poetic dialogue any way you wish without regard to ever settling anything. A windy debate of philosophy—‘Yeah! That’s what I’m talkin about!’ Never mind if it doesn’t lead anywhere. It becomes one of those, ‘they are having their reward in full’ scenarios of which Jesus spoke at Matthew chapter 6.

But if you don’t cleave the book into two, you come away with some understanding. You come away with the knowledge that humans can maintain integrity to God under the most trying circumstances. They may give vent to plenty of ‘wild talk’ along the way, not being privy to the big picture, but eventually the dust settles, all is forgiven, and the louts that leaned into the righteous with their own smug theories of superiority get rebuked.

Those three interrogators do lean into Job, and Job says, ‘Why aren’t you ashamed?’ “These ten times you have rebuked me; You are not ashamed to deal harshly with me.“ (Job 19:3) They should be ashamed—using their robust health to pound an unfortunate into the ground. 

“Show me mercy, my companions, show me mercy, For God’s own hand has touched me,” Job pleads, but they show him none. Aggravated that their initial gentle accusations were rejected, they double down and turn vengeful. “It gets personal,” Kushner says. Gentle insinuations become harsh accusations. The three appoint themselves interrogators for God, though God has asked for no such interrogators, terrorists who will brook no ‘wild talk,’ who will regard it all as apostasy to be put down with machine gun fire. 

What they should do is ‘weep with those who weep.’ What they should do is quote Ecclesiastes 5:2: “Do not be quick with your mouth, nor let your heart speak rashly before the true God, for the true God is in the heavens but you are on the earth. That is why your words should be few.” Job’s three visitors do not use few words; they use many, although they can’t possibly know what they are talking about, since “the true God is in the heavens but you are on the earth.”

Horrific suffering happens today. Some months ago a young woman in a nearby circuit suffered vicious physical assault. Even Job was not physically assaulted. Nor did he suffer the complete betrayal of the human justice system when the perpetrator was brought to court. Her life irrevocably changed with scars that are not visible, she decided to go public, as a first step towards healing. She’s very brave. She also hopes, no doubt, to forestall any speculation from those who see her altered behavior but have not the facts to put it in context. It’s good congregations are in the Book of Job lately, from which we may draw the conclusion that we don’t need them.

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I had the Bible reading last week and tried to do it as Brother Friend advised: “Put some fire in your talk . . . or put your talk in the fire.”

I read Job 12:1-2 as though Job is kicking back at his accusers—it seems pretty obvious.

Then Job said in reply: 2 “Surely you are the people who know, And wisdom will die out with you!  3 But I too have understanding. I am not inferior to you. Who does not know these things?

‘Look, any donkey knows the things you are saying, but what makes you think it applies to me?’ is his complaint.

Then, some sarcasm about how the wicked and the fools sail along breezily, suffering no punishment at all: “The carefree person has contempt for calamity, Thinking it is only for those whose feet are unsteady.  6 The tents of robbers are at peace, And those who provoke God are secure, Those who have their god in their hands.”

Then—a bit more interpretive, his contrasting accusation that, whereas Eli, Bill, and Zop can’t read what’s going on, even the animals, birds, fish, and the very earth, can. Everyone knows what’s going on except these three guys—and they would teach that trio if the latter weren’t so blockheaded: ‘The hand of Jehovah has done this—unjustly caused all his calamity:  

However, ask, please, the animals, and they will instruct you; Also the birds of the heavens, and they will tell you.  8 Or give consideration to the earth, and it will instruct you; And the fish of the sea will declare it to you.  9 Who among all these does not know That the hand of Jehovah has done this?  

The rest of the chapter is Job’s diatribe that God plays havoc with what he’s created, for who knows what reason? Maybe just for his own amusement. I’m not sure those final verses . . . 

He makes counselors go barefoot, And he makes fools of judges. He loosens the bonds imposed by kings, And he binds a belt around their waist. He makes priests walk barefoot, And he overthrows those who are firmly established in power; He deprives trusted advisers of speech And takes away the sensibleness of old men; He pours out contempt upon nobles, And he makes powerful ones weak; He reveals deep things from the darkness, And he brings deep darkness into the light; He makes nations grow great in order to destroy them; He enlarges nations, that he may lead them into exile. He takes away the understanding of the leaders of the people And makes them wander in trackless wastelands. They grope in darkness, where there is no light; He makes them wander about like drunken men. (17-25)

. . . should be read as though Job, in his distress, nonetheless rises to the occasion to deliver an impromptu talk in praise of God, praising him for thwarting the plans of the wicked. Nah, in happier times, yes, but not now. Now, in the midst of unrelenting anguish following unspeakable tragedy, is he not bewailing that God thwarts them all? Good or bad—it makes no difference to him. ‘Is not wisdom and understanding found in the aged?’ (vs 12) Well, nobody is older than He. “With him there are wisdom and mightiness; He has counsel and understanding.” And to what end does he put these qualities? To set up his creatures like dominoes, then nudge the end one to see the entire row topple!

Remember, we’ve opened the door in recent years to Job venting some ‘wild talk.’ (6:3) Is he not doing it here? 

From chapter 10, the previous week’s reading: “You have given me life and loyal love; You have guarded my spirit with your care.” A good sentiment. But the next verse is less good. “But you secretly intended to do these things. I know that these things are from you.” (vs 12-13) Translation? He set me up for a fall!

I think Job felt this way because that’s how felt in my own perfect prolonged storm of calamitous events—less severe than Job’s in most respects, but as severe in others. If you didn’t know of the heavenly events described in the book’s first two chapters, which Job didn’t, is that not exactly what one might think in his shoes?

And long ago I read somewhere that ‘scholars’—the critical kind, no doubt, think the first two chapters of Job were cobbled on later, that they are not original. Someday I’ll look to see whether they provide any justification for this view beyond that it reads too ‘fundamentalist’ for them, and that it solves the problem, whereas they prefer windy back-and-forth that flatters the intellect but doesn’t solve the problem unsolved, thereby leaving them to spin it any way they like. “I would never say that higher education is valueless,” says a sister who has benefited from her degree, “but it does have a way of taking things that are simple and making them complicated.”

*(Indeed, the ‘educated’ think there are two Jobs; one is the first two and last chapters, the other all the rest. I think the appeal is to put one in position to understand neither, yet continue to flatter the intellect. In the case of the unattached first, you get to isolate it and thus reassure your educated friends that you, too, are not so stupid as to believe in a literal devil. In the case of the unattached 2nd, you get to spin wordy treatises on the wordy speeches, unconcerned about whether they go anywhere.)

Sort of like when Ted Putsch, my impetuous Bible student from Tom Irregardless and Me, who hasn’t yet learned tact and should be locked up for six months until he does, leans into my full-of-himself return visit, Bernard Strawman, with, “Look, it couldn’t be simpler! Or is that the problem with you?!”

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Question: Why are the three comforters who pay Job a visit “afraid?”

As in: “For this is how you have become to me; You have seen the terror of my calamity, and you are afraid.” (Job 6:21)

Of course, we don’t know for sure that they were. It is what Job says of them after they traipse in from afar, put on a fantastic dust-throwing show, then watch him like vultures for 7 days before opening their mouths:

“Three companions of Job heard about all the calamities that had come upon him, and each came from his own place—Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite. So they agreed to meet together to go and sympathize with Job and comfort him. When they saw him from a distance, they did not recognize him. They began to weep loudly and to rip their garments apart, and they threw dust into the air and onto their heads. Then they sat on the ground with him for seven days and seven nights. No one said a word to him, for they saw that his pain was very great.” (2:11-13)

But my money’s on Job—even though Eliphaz also makes the cut for words quoted in the New Testament. It is his “He catches the wise in their own cunning” (5:13) that is repeated verbatim at 1 Corinthians 3:19) So he can’t be a rotter through and through to have lines taken up by Paul. More on this later. Meantime, why is my money on Job and his assessment that these ones who look on his calamity are “afraid.” How is it they are afraid?

Isn’t it because they know, deep down, that what happened to Job could just as easily happen to them? Job, who reaches the point of cursing the day he was born, Job who says: “For what I have dreaded has come upon me . . . I have had no peace, no quiet, no rest” (3:25-26) —they know it could just as easily happen to them. They dread it, too.

That’s why they have to carry on with more and more assertion that God is punishing Job for past sins, even though nobody can point to any. It’s all a facade, though they don’t know it themselves. They have to maintain the facade, for they cannot bear the alternative—that they might be living fine and easy as you please one moment, doing nothing wrong, and then one day Job-like calamity falls upon them. They cannot bear to think it. So they must maintain Job is being punished for something or other. 

When Job protests that he has not done anything wrong, at least not egregiously so, they double down, all of them do, building upon one another’s remarks, ultimately becoming truly vicious. Sometimes counselors do that—they double down. You hope they won’t; you hope when their words are resisted, they will at least consider that they may have missed the mark. Alas, there is a certain type of counselor that doesn’t like to be contradicted. That type doubles down. 

So it is with these blunderbuss counselors of Job. They’re not bad guys, probably. Never mind my last post when I said they were—what was I smoking? No, they seem to have meant well—initially. They didn’t have to come visit Job at all, and yet they did. But Job’s calamity strikes unexpected terror into their own hearts, so they pursue a path that safeguards them, regardless of the effect it has on poor Job.

Other posts on Job here and here.

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I’m starting to play with the notion, for an upcoming talk, that if you wanted the policies of one party to prevail, would you vote for the other party? So it is that Jesus demonstrates control over the elements (fed the crowds, stilled the windstorm, healed some sick)—deeds that neither of the two political parties can touch. And yet people keep voting for the human parties that can’t do these good things.

To be sure, the promises of the kingdom of God are future, whereas those of the two squabbling human parties are here and now. Still, since they so eclipse human promises, one would almost think more people would ‘vote’ (take interest in) the doings of that kingdom rather than campaign incessantly for the human parties.

Similarly, if you consistently vote for one party, can you be livid that the policies of the other do not prevail? So it is when skeptics and atheists fume at God for not eliminating suffering—blaming him for every famine and natural disaster. Why didn’t he stop it from happening? Well, they keep voting for the wrong party. You would think they would vote for the party that can control these things. Instead, the vote for the party[s] that not only can’t control these things, but that exacerbates, even causes, them. The previous New York governor said he didn’t want to weigh in on the climate change debate, but 100-year floods were now occurring every two years, so clearly something was happening

To be fair, the ‘here and now’ will generally capture attention before that of ‘the future.’ That will favor the promises of the human parties, even if so many of them aren’t realized. There are some people who give barely a thought to the future—how do they know it will bode them any good? Maybe it will be like Nicholson’s character in Batman, who yells, “Hey, Eckhert! Think of the future!” before putting a bullet through the creepy lout.

The reason kingdom promises (feed the crowds, still the storm, heal the sick) must wait is that time is needed to complete and clear out the wreckage from the failed experiment of human self-rule. Put in a nutshell, that ‘experiment’ goes:

God: ‘You can’t rule yourselves.’

A&E: ‘Watch us.’

God: Okay, I will, and when the elapsed time is done, we will see if you have capably ruled the planet or brought it to the precipice of disaster.’

A lot of time is spanned.

The planet is not at the precipice of disaster today? Just like the Barry McQuire song; “You don’t believe we’re on the eve of destruction?” Accordingly, our Lord provides a few examples of feeding, controlling, and healing. He didn’t do everyone, for his time was not then. He provided a few tokens, as evidence of what he will do when his rulership arrived. If a candidate promised to heal the sick and provided no evidence he could do so, would you believe him?

Yikes! That song of Barry Mcquire? He sang that 60 years ago. As though a false prophet!! I know someone else who has been called a false prophet a time or two.

On the other hand, if you have labor pains and they subside, it doesn’t mean that a birth is not coming. Not wanting to take anything for granted and knowing the importance of proof, I ran this statement past my wife. She confirmed it was true.

To be continued…

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“[The wicked one] waits in ambush near the settlements . . . His eyes are watching for an unfortunate victim. He waits in his hiding place like a lion in its lair. He waits to seize the helpless one. . . . The victim is crushed and brought down.” (Psalm 10:8-10)

I don’t really know anyone like this. Even of the sleazy mechanic who billed me for a new carburetor on my Tesla I wouldn’t go that far.

On and on the psalmist goes about how the wicked one shakes you like a dog with a rat. I begin to see why Rosie said when she first read the psalms as a young girl, “Man, this guy sure whines a lot!” Who in the world is he talking about?

They picked on him a lot back in the day, I suppose, but today, while the verse might not find fulfillment in your neighbor who plays his music too loud, you could apply it to machinations of humans, be they political parties, governments, or powers transcending governments who push schemes, sometimes will full knowledge they are making you trouble, doing so for their idea of the ‘greater good.’ That scenario fits the tone of the psalm. It’s not for nothing that the Bible likens governments to ‘the heavens.’ They drench you one moment, scorch you the next, freeze you after that, and there’s not a thing you can do about it.

Verses like #4 suggest it’s all the work of the atheists:

“In his haughtiness, the wicked man makes no investigation; All his thoughts are: “There is no God.’”

Sometimes it is that way but it is not necessarily so. Other verses allow that they may acknowledge there’s a God but count him as a non-factor.

“He says in his heart: “God has forgotten. He has turned away his face. He never notices.” (vs 11)

Besides, here’s a commentator (in connection with ‘the senseless one who says in his heart ‘there is no Jehovah’) who says there were no atheists back then, at least not enough to single out as a class: “It never occurred to any writer of the OT [Hebrew Scriptures] to prove or argue the existence of God. . . .It is not according to the spirit of the ancient world in general to deny the existence of God, or to use arguments to prove it. The belief was one natural to the human mind and common to all men.” Dr. James Hastings, A Dictionary of the Bible.

It matters little to say there is a God. What matters is what attributes you assign to him. As much as we think it dated that ancient peoples worship different gods, and say ‘Isn’t there just one God?’ if we hold to radically different views of God, is it not in effect different gods that we envision? Just like you mention Howie Horseradish and I say ‘I know that guy!’ But when further discussion reveals that the attributes and physical qualities don’t line up, I say, ‘Oh, I guess I don’t know him after all. We’re speaking of two persons who happen to share the same name.’

I’ll take God with the attributes he assigns himself. Who are these characters that assign him whatever attributes they find convenient? I’ll take the overall lesson of the psalm. They’re cocky as all get-out but God will eventually set matters straight. It’s an underlying theme of the Bible. Humans insist upon self-rule (the underlying Genesis message of knowing ‘good’ and ‘bad.’ God says, ‘Don’t try it—you’ll mess it all up.’ They do so anyway. God says, ‘Alright, I allot you such-and-such an amount of time to make good on your claim. When the time is up, we’ll see what kind of a world you’ve made.’

“[The wicked one] says in his heart: ‘I will never be shaken; For generation after generation I will never see calamity.’” (vs 6)

What says the psalmist of God? “Rise up, O Jehovah. O God, lift up your hand. . . . you do see trouble and distress. You look on and take matters in hand. To you the unfortunate victim turns. . . . Break the arm of the wicked and evil man, So that when you search for his wickedness, You will find it no more.” (vs 12-15)

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